Award-winning poet Joshua Clover theorizes the riot as the form of the coming insurrection

Baltimore. Ferguson. Tottenham. Clichy-sous-Bois. Oakland. Ours has become an “age of riots” as the struggle of people versus state and capital has taken to the streets. Award-winning poet and scholar Joshua Clover offers a new understanding of this present moment and its history. Rioting was the central form of protest in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was supplanted by the strike in the early nineteenth century. It returned to prominence in the 1970s, profoundly changed along with the coordinates of race and class.

From early wage demands to recent social justice campaigns pursued through occupations and blockades, Clover connects these protests to the upheavals of a sclerotic economy in a state of moral collapse. Historical events such as the global economic crisis of 1973 and the decline of organized labor, viewed from the perspective of vast social transformations, are the proper context for understanding these eruptions of discontent. As social unrest against an unsustainable order continues to grow, this valuable history will help guide future antagonists in their struggles toward a revolutionary horizon.

Reviews

“Riot, in this absolutely necessary book, is considered as differential procedure and rigorous improvisational method, as essential repertoire on the way from general malaise to general strike. But then this conception folds tightly yet disorderly into a new and open set of questions. It’s not that the raging, ragged entrance to the new golden age is the new golden age. It’s not that theory can’t bear a riot. It’s just that riot makes new ways of seeing what theory can and can’t do and imposes upon us a kind of knowledge of our own embarrassing and already given resources of enjoyment. Joshua Clover says riot deserves a proper theory but here—sly, stone cold—he gives us more than that. Now we have some guidelines for the new and ongoing impropriety that fleshes forth and fleshes out our optimal condition.”

– Frederick Charles Moten, University of California, Riverside, author of The Feel Trio

“Joshua Clover’s project is to reveal the continuities between Occupy and Ferguson, and to historicize a new era of uprisings within the long centuries of capital restructuring, racialized containment, and collective action. In its sweep, rigor, and elegance, Riot. Strike. Riot is pleasurable and provocative, worthy of the urgent debates it should inspire.”

– Jeff Chang, author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and Who We Be: The Colorization of America

“In the split second between
the throwing and the landing
of a Molotov lies a world of
conceptual confusion. Joshua
Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot is
the crystalline analysis of this
fraught moment—between
communism and anarchism,
between street protest and
economic strike. Much like
a riot, it opens up the future
while remembering that the
past is comprised of little other
than exploitation, exclusion
and the kind of violence that
is deliberately attributed to the
very people who suffer most
from it. It is a book that hones
both thought and action, and
superglues back together, with
force, the unhappy dividing of
the two.”

– Nina Power, senior lecturer in philosophy at Roehampton University and author of One-Dimensional Woman

Much has been written about the gilets jaunes and their relation to both politics, of the left and the right, and historical waves of labour unrest. In this article, Joshua Clover argues that the gilets jaunes are in fact a texbook example of a contemporary riot, and may be best seen as an early example of an approaching wave of climate riots.

How do we think through the relation between race and class in capitalism? Responding to the recent intervention of Adolph Reed, Joshua Clover and Nikhil Pal Singh argue that, following Stuart Hall, race is the modality in which class is lived and that only by capturing the fundamental social experience of the unity of race and class can we avoid the pitfalls of separating them analytically and falling into "bothandism".